Book Image

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

By : Enrico Valenza, Ton Roosendaal
Book Image

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

By: Enrico Valenza, Ton Roosendaal

Overview of this book

Cycles is Blender's new, powerful rendering engine. Using practical examples, this book will show you how to create a vast array of realistic and stunning materials and texture effects using the Cycles rendering engine. Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook is a practical journey into the new and exciting Cycles rendering engine for Blender. In this book you will learn how to create a vast array of materials and textures in Cycles, including glass, ice, snow, rock, metal and water. If you want to take your 3D models to the next level, but don't know how, then this cookbook is for you! In this practical cookbook, you will learn how to create stunning materials and textures to really bring your 3D models to life! Diving deep into Cycles you will learn Cycle's node-based material system, how to set-up a 3D scene for rendering, how to create a natural and man-made materials as well as the correct organization and re-use of Cycles materials to save you time and effort. To ensure that your creations look stunning you will learn how illumination works in Cycles, improve the quality of the final render and to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. Each chapter of Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook builds on the complexity of the last so that by the end of this book you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures.

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Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook
Enrico Valenza | Ton Roosendaal
Jun, 2013 | 280 pages
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Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook
Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Overview of Materials in Cycles
Overview of Materials in Cycles
Introduction
Material nodes in Cycles
Procedural textures in Cycles
Setting the World material
Creating a mesh-light material
Using displacement (aka bump)
2
Managing Cycles Materials
Managing Cycles Materials
Introduction
Preparing an ideal Cycles interface for material creation
Naming materials and textures
Creating node groups
Linking materials
3
Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
Introduction
Creating a rock material using image maps
Creating a rock material using procedural textures
Creating a sand material using procedural textures
Creating a simple ground material using procedural textures
Creating a snow material using procedural textures
Creating an ice material using procedural textures
Creating a clean running water material
4
Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
Introduction
Creating a generic plastic material
Creating a bakelite material
Creating an expanded polystyrene material
Creating a clear (glassy) polystyrene material
Creating a rubber material
Creating an antique bronze material with procedurals
Creating a multipurpose metal group node
Creating a worn metal material with procedurals
Creating a rusty metal material with procedurals
Creating a wood material with procedurals
5
Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
Introduction
Creating an ocean material using procedural textures
Creating underwater environment materials
Creating a snowy mountain landscape with procedurals
Creating a realistic planet Earth as seen from space
6
Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
Introduction
Creating cloth materials with procedurals
Creating a leather material with procedurals
Creating a synthetic sponge material with procedurals
Creating a brick wall material with procedurals
Creating a spaceship hull
7
Creating Organic Materials
Creating Organic Materials
Introduction
Creating a snake-like scaly material with image maps and procedurals
Creating a wasp-like chitin material with procedural textures
Creating a beetle-like chitin material with procedural textures
Creating a grass shader
Creating tree shaders – the bark
Creating tree shaders – the leaves
Creating a Gray Alien skin material with procedurals

About the Author

Enrico Valenza, also known on the Web as "EnV", is an Italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers, such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti, as a cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books.

He graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later was a student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.

When he started to work, computers weren't that popular among the masses, and he spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustrations with traditional media, usually on cardboards. Particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertising work.

But this was only until the moment Jurassic Park came to the theaters: he then decided to buy a computer and try his hand at this "computer graphic" thing everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught in the many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilities—in particular, Blender.

In 2005, he won the Suzanne Awards for "Best animation, original idea, and story" with the animation New Penguoen 2.38.

In 2006, he joined the Orange Team for the last two weeks of production in Amsterdam, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open source CG-animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, named Elephants Dream.

From 2007 to 2008, he was a Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of Big Buck Bunny, the Blender Foundation's second open movie.

From 2010 to 2011, he was an Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the Museo della Città di Bologna project, that is, the production of a stereoscopic CG-animated documentary made in Blender and explaining Bologna's history.

Being also a Blender Certified Trainer, he collaborates as a CG artist with Italian production studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to the open source.

He uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting over with other open source applications such as The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint.

He has presented several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.

I would like to say thanks to my family: my father Giuseppe and my mother Licia, for giving me the possibility to follow what I always thought was my path in life, my wonderful wife Micaela and my beautiful daughter Sara, just for being there and encouraging me while writing this book.

Then, I would like to thank, obviously, Ton Roosendaal for creating Blender and Brecht Van Lommel for Cycles. I would also like to thank all the blender-heads at the BlenderArtist and at the Kino3d forums for all the testing, experimentations, explanations, and examples about the Cycles features and materials creation that were (and still are) often posted almost at the same time they are implemented in the software. Especially on BlenderArtist.org, there is a very long and informative thread at this address, which, at this moment, has already reached 540 pages:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering

And another one at this address, which is already more than 200 pages long:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216866-Cycles-tests-the-new-blender-CPU-GPU-renderer-of-awesomeness

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